Archive for November, 2010

I did this last time with Baby Evan’s due date and it was fun (plus if I don’t do it again I’m afraid my friend Lareign might send me a flaming bag of poo – she really likes guessing). This time I was going to set things up fancier with some sort of website to keep track of everyone’s guesses but it seems sort of unnecessary – I mean, on a good day I get 15 comments, do I REALLY need some sort of software to tell me the 23rd is the closest day to the 24th? I might be too big for my literal britches but getting too big for my metaphorical britches is just annoying.

So here’s the deal: Leave a comment on this post guessing the date and time you think Baby Sandy will make her official appearance into the world. I’m including hour/minute this pregnancy so people can guess the same day if they want, but this isn’t Price is Right so you can be closest even if you go over. I’m also making it much! more! exciting! by offering the winner an actual prize – I recently bought some gorgeous yarn with sequins woven into it and will be knitting something pretty, like a scarf or a cowl that I will mail to the person who is closest. (That is, if you want it. You can’t really give it as a Christmas gift, because there’s very little chance I’ll even KNOW who won by Christmas, and you might think handmade knit stuff is sort of dorky so if you don’t want it you can just say so nicely and I’ll keep it for myself donate it to a charity or something.)

Here’s all the info I have that might help you make your guess:

– Her official due date is December 26th, based entirely on an early ultrasound (which is supposed to be the most accurate measure) since I didn’t have a last menstrual period to go by
– I was 4 days late with Evan (Due April 1st, born April 5th)
– He was born at 7:21 pm after about 20 hours of labor, less than 11 of which I was in the hospital
– All 3 of my mother’s babies were late
– I’ve been having contractions (practice ones, not real ones, called Braxton-Hicks) since I was about 28 weeks
– When I went into the hospital for the HORRIBLE PAIN, my contractions were mild but consistently 3 minutes apart until they made the pain stop
– But when the doctor checked I was dilated <1cm
– There’s no reason to think I will be induced for any reason since besides the (harmless to the baby) kidney stones I am in excellent health
– Anywhere between 38-42 weeks is considered normal
– I am going to do everything possible to NOT spend Christmas Day in the hospital, so if that means holding my knees together while we open gifts so be it

Any questions? I have an OB appointment today but it’s pants-on so I doubt I’ll have any new info. My follow up with the urologist (where he’s going to do something incredibly unpleasant and OMG I can’t even think about it right now) is Wednesday and if THAT changes anything I’ll update this post then too. I’m not going to close the comments but dudes, they’re timestamped, so if you guess AFTER I send out “I had the baby!” tweets/texts/Facebook updates you’re disqualified.

Have you ever been unemployed? It sucks. You sit around all day alternating between feeling miserable and sorry for yourself and sudden bursts of energy where you vow to use every second of your free time as a chance to finally organize your pantry/paint all your baseboards/read War & Peace/write those thank you notes from last Christmas. For a little while, having a MISSION and a PLAN and GOALS makes you forget how much it sucks that no one is paying you to do anything. Then you realize no one actually gives a shit if your baseboards are dirty and fall into the pit of despair and crawl back under your Snuggie to watch Judge Judy and feel sorry for yourself while moaning about how unfair everything is.

That’s what life is like every day with a 19 month old. For him, not for me. My job of simply keeping him alive is almost more than I can handle most days.

Only instead of acting out in normal ways, like excessive morning drinking and crying at the grocery store, he expresses his displeasure at feeling unimportant by dumping an entire bowl of Cheerios on the floor and stomping on them. Or by throwing my iPhone at the dog. Or by appointing himself Mayor of Trash and freaking the freak out every time anyone else tries to pick up/throw away things. OMG HOW COULD YOU MAMA THAT GRANOLA BAR WRAPPER WAS MY OWN SPESHUL FAVORITE THING??!?!

I’ve tried getting him involved in various household chores -“Honey, can you hand Mommy the silverware from the dishwasher?” “Ok, where do the dirty diapers go?” “Yah! Let’s pick up our toys! What a fun game!” – but he’s a toddler, not an idiot. He knows those are just dirty tricks to make him think he’s helping and not His Job. So far I haven’t been able to come up with anything toddler appropriate (he can’t feed the dog because he eats the dog food), time consuming (especially between the hours of 10:30 am and noon aka SCREAM’O’CLOCK), and exhausting (because, really, isn’t tiring him out the whole point?) enough to count as WORK. 19 months is too young for chores though, right? I mean besides what I’m already doing? Or did I already miss the boat on helping and now he’s going to be a lazy, selfish man-child slob his entire life?

Man, this parenting thing is super fun and stress free.

I don’t suppose there’s some sort of waiver I can sign that lets him work at Target, right? I miss the discount.

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I didn’t do very well this week and the pics I did take are a little boring. But to be fair, how many pictures of the inside of a hospital room can you take? Especially when your iPhone is dead? At least I got the kid looking cute in a couple.

Sunday:

My in-laws brought us this box full of homemade jam & pie filling. Then we used it as a baby race car. Wins for everyone!!

We discovered the trick to a peaceful meal is a kid's cup of lemonade served with a straw. Small price to pay to avoid a bottle of ketchup to the face.

Monday:

This is the cutest I've looked in WEEKS. Headband by Uff Da, knit shrug made by me, (non-maternity) shirt from Target, adorable toddler crashing my picture also by me.

E's sudden panic!! over yardwork led to some raking in the dark. At least it was warm.

Wednesday:

Hospital lunch. I have no idea what was even in there - it appeared and disappeared while I was too sick to even THINK about food.

Thursday:

Saddest family Thanksgiving picture ever.

Friday:

You can tell I was feeling better because I could actually SIT UP enough to knit, even hooked to an IV.

Saturday:

So good to be home & back to normal toddler mornings: milk, peanut butter and a football to cuddle while we watch the Today Show.

Apparently the "insanely busy" Christmas shopping season forgot about the day after the day after Thanksgiving. Scored those luggage sets Macy's has been advertising all week and discovered rolling carry-ons are Little Evan's favorite toy EVER.

Link up with the hop below and go to Amy’s blog to get your own HTML code so it shows on your own post. It doesn’t have to be iPhone photos, just camera phone/snapshots of your week!

Awesome Black Friday sales from some of my favorite Etsy/Big Cartel sellers so I can support handmade AND get my shop on from my couch.

FINALLY getting to decorate for Christmas, even if that means making E haul it all down from the attic and put it up while I point and say “No no, the COLORED lights go on the banister!”.

Only 30 more days until my due date.

Only 22 more days until my mommy gets here.

Just one more teeny tiny narcotic before bed so I can get a full 8 hours for the first time in WEEKS.

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In case anyone cares, here’s what ended up happening with medical stuff (meaning full of TMI):

The horrible painful pain in my right side was being caused by a medium sized kidney stone that had traveled down my ureter and blocked it, which is why when Man Doctor poked me in the actual kidney I said it didn’t hurt. They waited overnight to see if maybe it would come out but it didn’t budge so they went in with a ureterscope and a little basket to pull it out. To prevent any further blockage, the urologist left a stent – a plastic tube – that goes from my ureter to my bladder in place for a few days. I go in on Wednesday to have it removed…which I fear is going to involve yanking it out by the little string that’s attached. I will bring my narcotics with me, just in case.

An ultrasound shows I have at least two more large stones on the right hand side that will have to be broken up, but it’s safer to wait until after the baby is born. The real problem is I have a few small ones on the left hand side to that could either pass with little/no problem or also get stuck. The urologist couldn’t believe I had never been diagnosed with kidney stones before considering the size/number I have now. So I’m on strict orders to drink a zillion gallons of water a day and not take any more Tums – turns out the calcium in the Tums (combined with pregnancy in general) is probably what caused the stones. So pregnant ladies, watch yourselves. As bad as my heartburn is I would take it a zillion times over instead of 18 hours of undiagnosed kidney stone pain. A BILLION ZILLION TRILLION TIMES.

Here’s how I was supposed to spend Thanksgiving:
Wake up at 3 am on Wednesday, whine for the whole 9 hour drive to Ohio about how uncomfortable I was, eat an enormous amount of pie, complain that E was playing WoW while the wominz had to mind the child, do a little Black Friday Shopping, eat some Chick-fil-a, whine about the 9 hour drive home, have a really nice time even after all the complaining.

Here’s how I spent my Thanksgiving instead:
Tuesday night before I went to bed I suddenly got a horrible stabbing pain on the right side of my back. After asking Dr. Google for advice, I chugged water and cranberry juice for a few hours, only to throw it all up because I was in so much pain. Called my OB’s answering service, Man Doctor on call said if it wasn’t contractions (it wasn’t) it was a pulled muscle so I should try putting heat on it and taking more Tylenol. I spent the entire night wandering around the house moaning and being miserable. When E woke up at 3 am I told him we could either go to Ohio the next day or he could go without me, because there was NO FRICKING WAY I was getting in a car until I felt better. At 7 am I gave up on waiting for office hours and called Man Doctor back to warn him I was coming into L&D. When I got there, they hooked me up to the monitors and said “oh look, contractions! and you said you were throwing up? definitely a pulled muscle.” Luckily the treatment for my “pulled muscle” was a lovely dose of morphine so I immediately passed out and when I woke up Man Doctor was gone and Lady Doctor was here. She decided maybe an ultrasound to check my kidneys would be a good idea. Turns out I have about a zillion kidney stones and I am not a crazy person who just cries over a pulled back muscle but instead someone in an enormous amount of agony with a condition that required immediate treatment as well as more procedures post-baby. The urologist decided he could take out the one causing me pain first thing in the morning. So Thanksgiving morning I was strapped down to a table in surgery, given a spinal and *you’re probably enjoying your pie right now so I’ll skip the rest*. By 11am I was back in my room and once again in possession of my iPhone charger (never ever ever go to the hospital for any reason without: phone charger, toothbrush.) By 2 pm I was free of tubes and catheters and leg pressure cuffs and just hanging out waiting for another dose of narcotics. Turns out the only good part of kidney stones at 35 weeks pregnant is that the baby is so close to full term I’m allowed to have drugs. Because NO ONE can just “breath through” a kidney stone. At least when you give birth you get a baby at the end to cuddle. I saw the stone they took out and it wasn’t very cute at all. Now I am just stuck here until they give me a couple more doses of antibiotics and write a prescription for a painkiller for me to take home. Because, oh, did I forget that part? They had to leave a stint in my ureter to keep it from swelling shut, so my pain has decreased about 60% but isn’t going away for at least another week – when they have to take the stint out again.

So to sum up: no road trip, no pie, no time with family, no turkey, extreme pain, slightly terrifying surgery, and one more night in the hospital to go.

I should win some sort of Thanksgiving do-over contest, right? Or at least maybe a pie. Good news is that Baby Sandy is taking it all like a champ, not the slightest hint she cares about mama’s kidney stones. Sadly, Little Evan hates being here so I haven’t gotten to see him much (because really, how much fun is it to have you baby scream for dada and run away when you try to hug him? Not fun. Good way to turn into a sobbing mess.)

I hope your Thanksgiving is going much better and even if you’re trapped at your crazy aunt’s house choking down burnt turkey at least no one has stuck anything up your pee-hole today.

Apologies for my inability to stick with a tense or person for that whole post. Writing from my iPhone is hard.

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Bonjour! No I'm not French, it just sounded fancy. Sorry for the confusion. I'm Suzanne, a 33-year-old mom, photographer, Navy wife, blogger, baker, and amateur at pretty much everything else. The stars of the show are Evan, born 4/5/09, Caroline, born 12/19/2010 and Lincoln, born 7/23/2014, with baby number FOUR due at the end of August 2016. We live in Connecticut and enjoy it very much except for most of February and March. You can find more of my photos (or even hire me!) over on my photography site, Ginger Snaps Pictures. I love hearing from you so if you have questions, stories or ideas to share, email me at bebehblog@gmail.com .

Affiliate disclosure: some of my posts contain links which may be affiliate links. That means I get Diet Coke money if you happen to like something I mention enough to buy it. I appreciate it!